Petit Cénacle
by TheHighestPie
Summary: In 1830, Jean Prouvaire, Théophile Gautier, and Philothée O'Neddy meet and debate "liberalism in literature" in conjunction with the events of the 'Battle of Hernani.'  Almost 40 years later, Gautier and O'Neddy can't help but remember.


Look at me, posting fic again. LJ-goers may well have seen this floating around in an earlier form, but I'm just now getting around to polishing and publishing it.

I was going to type up some background notes for this, but they'd probably be longer than the story itself. It's Hernani-fic, which either tells you everything or nothing. But in brief: Hugo's play _Hernani_ (1830) and the rather boisterous events surrounding it are often credited with kicking off the Romantic movement in France. There's a fair amount of fanon that at least some of the Amis would have been all over the "Battle" - which is reasonable in that many of them were in some way based on Hugo's artistic supporters/followers from that era. The next time the play was staged was in 1867, while Napoléon III was still in power and Hugo still in exile on Guernsey. Disclaimer that I played it pretty fast and loose with the personalities of the Théophiles.

* * *

><p><strong>1830<strong>

Standing outside the unfamiliar door, its identity both obscured and made plain by a layer fine white dust, Jean Prouvaire reached into the inner pocket of his waistcoat and fished out a little scrap of paper covered with a few lines of near-illegible writing.

_Du S's atelier  
>Thursday. 2.<br>Knock nine times. Grocer._

He stared at it for a few moments, nodded in resolution, then shredded the paper into little pieces that he then returned to his pocket. Carefully, he removed his favorite hat (the ostentatious tricorn topped by a battered ostrich feather) and held his ear near the wood. Upon hearing low voices inside, he drew back and replaced his hat. He pounded on the door, a cloud of dust swallowing his hand as he beat out the pattern.

"Who's there?" someone called from inside.

"One called Isaiah," he hissed.

"Did you bring the cabbage?"

"I'm no grocer."

Metal clinked on the other side, then the door creaked open to reveal the curious features of Philothée O'Neddy. "Come in, friend! We're not fully convened yet, but have a seat with Théophile and me while we wait."

"The mysterious Isaiah! Yes, come on in," Théophile Gautier called from a table in the middle of a clean-swept circle in the otherwise dusty workshop. He stood and gestured to an ill-matched collection of glasses. "Get yourself a drink and tell us what this urgent business is."

"Oh, many thanks, my brothers," Jehan bounded into the room. "Thank you for your time and," he smiled and grabbed a glass "your hospitality, but yes, there is something very important to the ongoing battle of Hernani that we need to discuss."

"Things go well," Gautier shrugged. "The press and old men can scream all they like, but not even censorship could diminish our triumph, now. A few more weeks of showing them all that we and our art are here to stay, and the path will be clear for Hugo and others to drive Racine and his dusty ilk out of the _Comédie_ forever."

"And beyond that? Once you have conquered the theater and set your sights on France herself?"

"What of it?"

"To that end, I must raise a vital question of nomenclature."

Gautier snorted. "Nomenclature indeed. Who are you?"

"I'm one of you, of course! _¡Hierro!_ Down with the gerontocracy!" His ostrich feather bobbed enthusiastically.

Gautier looked ready to speak again, but O'Neddy hushed him. "Wait," he said aside, "the Romantic Army needs all the soldiers it can find."

"The _claque_, at least, if not the command. Prophet or half-wit, I don't like where this one is going," Gautier muttered back.

"Hush!" O'Neddy turned back to their guest. "Your true name then, my friend?"

"Jehan Prouvaire. With an H, of course. In the Jehan. I'm a poet." He chewed his lip, then whipped off his hat in an elaborate bow. When he rose, his face bore an ecstatic smile. "Oh, it's such an honor to meet you both. Visionaries! Titans! An honor, truly. _¡Hierro!_" he cried again, the rolled R lodging awkwardly in the back of his throat.

Gautier could not ignore the complement. "You are too kind, M. Prouvaire."

"Please, I'm Jehan."

"Jehan it is, then. And the original question of names?"

"_Petit Cénacle_." He set his glass down on the table definitively. "It isn't right."

The sudden transformation from obsequiousness to confrontation made Gautier's eyebrows furrow in surprise. "Not right? How do you mean?"

"Brothers, it is a shamefully exclusive term. Not only an inner circle, but a _little_ inner circle?"

"Even if the _'petit_' were not necessary to distinguish ourselves from Nodier's crowd, what's wrong with it?"

"What's wrong?" Jehan cried indignantly, clutching the back of a chair. "What's wrong? How can we hope to inspire a mass movement when we define ourselves as something small? Elite, even! There's no point!"

"We? Who is this 'we'?"

"Théo…" O'Neddy murmured, but Gautier ignored him.

"It's a valid question, Philo! If he's going to criticize us, he should be able so say by what right he comes in and tells us how to run things. Well? Did I even see you at the premier?"

"I was there. I wore this hat the first night, and on the second, I had an ace of spades pinned to my lapel."

"Ah, but did Hugo give you a ticket?"

"…no. He would have, had I asked, I am sure, but I bought it."

"So you are even not one of us."

"_La jeune France _is free with her citizenship!"

"But not with her leadership. _Le Cénacle_ holds."

"Come, Jehan," O'Neddy interceded from where he was now distributing the rest of the wine. "Even if you apply the term to all the _Hernanistes_, it is still valid. We are the anti-bourgeois, but that does not make us the masses. Can your average man afford a Spanish dagger? Or ostrich feathers? Or a tailored doublet? Or even theater tickets?"

"No, of course not, but surely we stand for something greater than those things. '_Le libéralisme en littérature,_' no?"

"No need to quote _Cromwell _at us; doubtless we know it better than you," Gautier said airily as he took a seat and threw his feet onto the table, making O'Neddy wince in fear for his row of glasses. "Théo, are we political?"

"Individuals are free to do as they wish, but as a unit, we are political only so far as art compels us to be. No more."

"Art carried the audience of _Christophe Colomb _to the Austrian front – can it not bring you even to the streets?"

"Perhaps," Gautier replied. "We shall see. Politics may try to interfere with art, but art should not in itself be political."

"But you are! You are political already! You can't help it!"

Gautier only shrugged.

"Censorship!" Jehan cried. "Authors jailed! Does that mean nothing?"

"Of course it does. If old Capet tries, his guard will be met with our army, but why provoke him if he seems content to let us be?"

"But what of the Republic?"

"What of it?"

"You cowards! The world is falling into your open hands, and you would refuse to carry your rebellion beyond the walls of the _Comédie-Française_! There are more important monuments to tear down than a statue of Racine."

"Cowards?" Gautier growled, sitting up straight. "Were you with us the afternoon of February 25th, with the police circling, just daring us to lose your temper as the crowd pelted us with rotten fruit? A wrong move, and the similarities between us and the classicist idiots at _Christophe Colomb_ would have been carried an unpleasant step further."

"I was there," he tore off his hat and brandished it at Gautier, "and the unfortunate bend in my feather is a war wound that it received from a bit of flying cabbage. And I saw that you loved every moment of it."

"And you do not revel in whatever petty subversions you so nobly commit? For it seems to me that this is not your first foray into the world of revolutionary ideas."

"I can't say any more about that."

"But you already have."

"Only insofar as that we believe that the advancement of art will inevitably go hand in hand with the advancement of human government. We worry that you are pioneers of one but would turn your face from the light of the other."

"And now this is a different 'we,'" Gautier sighed. "Your 'we' is not our 'we.' And clearly these two different groups may have different aims."

"But how much stronger we would be together!"

"Listen," O'Neddy interjected once again, "when you decide to tear up your cobblestones, you'll more than likely see many of our number at your side. Our Lycanthrope, for one, could use a good riot, else he's like as not to punch a stagehand before long. But until then, let us have this moment for ourselves. Victory isn't certain yet, and we'll be damned if we let our art get buried under the rhetoric of your dear Republic."

"But the two will go together! They must!"

O'Neddy gave him a level look. "We consider it terribly clever and subversive to piss in the corners of the theater boxes. I really don't think you want us touching your noble ideals."

"But–"

The doors opened to two men, one dressed entirely in black, the other with a brilliant red waistcoat. Du Seigneur and Borel. Neither wore a hat.

"Ah!" said Gautier, "speak of the devil – Borel! Now, friend, if you will permit us, we must begin our meeting. And we already have a Jehan."

"Go back to your intrigues and leave us to ours," O'Neddy added, a bit more gently. "I wish you luck, but this, I fear, is not your circle."

* * *

><p><strong>1867<strong>

It had taken far more effort than it should have to walk to the _Comédie-Française_, but M. Théophile Dondey endured it as best he knew how: head up, hat on straight, cane held just so under his arm. Perhaps the tickets would be sold out. Perhaps this odd foray into the past would be made impossible. Perhaps.

He suppressed the urge to pause as he passed through the marble columns. There would be plenty of time to converse with ghosts later, but now he had a mission. With a deep breath, he entered.

Inside was a flurry of activity centering around the ticket office. "Twenty requests for every seat in the theater!" the man behind the window was crying. "And no, it doesn't matter what you pay! Any of you! Stay in line if you'd like to reserve a spot at later nights, but don't get cross with me when I tell you that the first week is sold out."

A later night. That would be acceptable, surely, and more removed from ambiguous memories, but M. Dondey found himself passing the crowd to go straight to the administrative offices. He knocked, then patiently waited in front of a door that he gladly would have kicked down nearly four decades before.

The door opened to an impressively bearded individual who looked less than pleased at being interrupted. "Yes? How may I help you?"

He heard his voice speaking as if of its own accord. "I was wondering if you had anything available for the premier."

"The answer is no, and this isn't the ticket office. Now if you will excuse me, there's much to be done before Thursday."

M. Dondey would have left it at that, but some force compelled him to press on in honor of things long ago gained and lost. "Would a Philothée O'Neddy receive a different response?"

The man froze, his gaze scrutinizing. What did he see of the "Blond Othello" of the legends? With his once-browned skin and blue eyes paled by years spent at a desk and his fair curls thinned by time and tamed by convention, would the old Bouzingo even be acknowledged? "You are…"

He could not allow that sentence to be completed. Philothée O'Neddy had been mortally wounded in June of '32, when the cholera carried off his father. Faced with an aging mother and an unmarried sister, the poet reverted to Théophile Dondey de Santeney and took up his father's government post. His friends, disgusted by this transition, abandoned him. His only book of poetry, paid for almost entirely by himself and printed by a cousin, sold barely three-hundred copies. O'Neddy could no longer be referred to in the present tense without reeking of necromancy.

"'Were' is more appropriate than 'are,' but yes, I was. The O'Neddy of '30 would very much like the Dondey of '67 to be at the first night of the reprise, if such a thing would be possible."

The administrator's face broke into a smile. "Auguste Vacquerie at your service, Monsieur. I'm honored that one of the great _Hernanistes_ would deign to come to the play's latest incarnation."

"Then I will have a seat?"

"If I must personally travel to Guernsey to obtain old Hugo's written permission to make it happen, I will. Anything. Just show up at the box office a bit before the performance and they'll get an usher to lead you straight to your place."

"You have my utmost gratitude," he murmured and grabbed Vacquerie's hand.

"So I may plan ahead, would you do me the smallest favor?"

"But of course."

"Do you know if any others aside from the two of you plan to come?"

"The two of us?" Dondey furrowed his brows.

"You and Gautier. Or have you not spoken to him?"

"Not at all. I've fallen out of touch with him…with all of the old crowd. Gautier is coming?"

"Yes. With your permission, I'll get you seats together. If nothing else, it will make for good publicity."

How strange it would be to see Gautier, now renowned for his art, after so many years. From the daguerreotypes, he had gotten fat, and would be unlikely to fit in the red doublet that had made the young man famous. But it would be good to share the moment with someone. "Yes, if you would be so kind."

* * *

><p>They met for dinner before this second premier. Gautier's hair was still wild, but not untamed, and he of course did not wear the doublet. A red handkerchief tucked in the pocket of his waistcoat was the only possible acknowledgement of his previous dress. Dondey wore his everyday costume of the respectable civil servant, adorned only with the red badge that he had carefully saved in the top drawer of his writing desk, its crimson paint faded to rust and the defiant <em>hierro<em> all but illegible.

They engaged in small talk over the meal – the success of Gautier's latest works, the path of Dondey's career – until finally over coffee they came to the point of the meeting.

"Strange," Dondey remarked, "that old _Hernani_ should still be stabbing his way through the public mind after so much time."

"And while Hugo languishes in England, no less. It's a wonder the government lets them keep at it. Especially after all that fuss over his _Misérables_."

Dondey laughed. "In the wake of that, I don't think they dare stop him. And so the political still stalks us, my old friend."

"Not me! Hugo on his little island invites this upon himself, and loves every second of it, but you know I've foresworn all those broken windows!"

"And I'm in the ministry of finance, yet here we both are."

Gautier shrugged and sipped his coffee. "For old times."

"Do you remember those odd political fellows who held to our fringes? Who thought they saw utopias in enjambment?"

"Fine ones we were to call anyone odd, but yes. What of them?"

"Nothing, I suppose. Our talk just reminded me of their arguments. I wonder what happened to them."

"Fought that July, I suspect, and then got old."

Dondey absently fingered the badge on his breast. "Boring dress, boring career, and boring politics?"

"Ah, my dear Philo, what else is there to do?"


End file.
